Firefighter

Getting Started

Being a real estate mogul is very profitable, and money begets money there. Still, Samson’s dream is to be a firefighter. His lots are doing their jobs, so now he can focus on his goal.

Now, prior to starting the game, I was tasked to place the new community lots for the new jobs. If you’re playing in other cities, you may not have to worry about it, but either way, note that your firehouse might not be in the same place as mine. Regardless, Samson heads over to the firehouse and, by interacting with the front door, applies to be a firefighter.

Unlike conventional jobs, being a firefighter pays per emergency and per week, rather than per day. See, Samson will get a weekly stipend every Sunday, but will be paid the same amount if he manages to clear an emergency. Further, if you take a look at the job panel…

You can see that the interface is slightly different than previous jobs. Unlike conventional jobs, it’s not all smiley faces, though the principle is the same: you have three things you need to work on to get promoted up the ladder. As you do well, the job experience bar starts to fill. When it maxes out, you get promoted! Pretty simple.

In Samson’s case, his three requirements are emergencies, skills, and coworkers. Mousing over them gives details: emergencies means to respond to fire alarms, skills means to improve Handiness and Athletic specifically, and coworkers means to improve relationships with fellow firefighters.

It’s a weekend, so Samson can’t really do much at the moment. He can certainly work on his skills and chat up his firefighting friends, but for the sake of the guide, we’re going to fast-forward a few days.

Now, when a firefighter is on the clock, there isn’t always something to do. Let’s face it: Sims are stupid, but they’re not burning things down every five seconds. So, in the meantime, Samson gets to hang out at the firehouse. This allows him to work on relationships with coworkers and his job skills, so it’s not like he’s wasting his time.

…Er, okay, it doesn’t have to be a waste of time, though it can be. Still, I guess playing SimAnimals does increase his relationship with fellow firefighter Bubba Bunch.

Time For Action!

All those wavy lines around the fire bell and the annoying sounds that come with can only mean one thing: someone got a little too friendly with their oven! Because I’m in control, Samson does not immediately drop everything: he’s still reading in the kitchen, and will continue to do so if I don’t do something.
This is a good time to pause the game and head into Map View. Check out the tag here…

Can’t get much more blatant of a clue than that. Samson can either drive there manually with a “Go Here” command, or the faster way, I click the fire truck.

“Maintain 59%”? Wow, Samson probably should have been working on the truck during his downtime. Notice that “Improve Horsepower 1” is grayed out, because Samson’s Handiness skill is at measly Level 1.

Well, enough about that. We can fix up the truck and work on Handiness later. Right now, we’ve got a fire to deal with, so Samson hits “Respond to Emergency.” Presently, he finds himself at the home of Ken Clinton. The family is already outside, because they’re not idiots; this, unfortunately, will not always be the case. Luckily, Samson’s first fire is a very small fire, which should be pretty easy.

I pause, and check out the scene. On the second floor, we see…

How did a fire start in the middle of a bathroom? Too many scented candles? Ah well, whatever. After selecting Samson, a little pop-up box on the left side reports how long things have taken so far, and what all Samson needs to do. For this one, all he needs to do is extinguish the flames. He charges inside, heads up the stairs, busts out his little fire extinguisher, and he goes to town. Metaphorically, of course.

With that done, Samson is free to do whatever he wants. He can actually hang out in the house for a bit and partake of their hospitality, but Samson is a hard worker. Instead, he interacts with the truck, and selects the “Return to Station” command. There, he works to maintain the truck, which has taken a very slight beating in the process. He can also maintain or even upgrade the alarm bell, which further decreases the response time between the fire starting and your own reaction! And also, don’t forget to upgrade yourself: Samson can do a self-interaction to upgrade his fire extinguisher, decreasing the time it will take him to put out the flames.

The firefighter career track is interesting in that most of your job experience will come from skill gains rather than fires. Despite only two emergencies, Samson quickly finds himself at career Level 7: his Athletic skill is a strong 9 and his Handiness is at 6, giving him frequent promotions even if he doesn’t have too many successful emergency responses under his belt.

As Samson gets promoted up the ladder (no pun intended), fires start to get more complicated. His third emergency takes him to a house that not only is ablaze, but has Sims who are trapped inside! Samson starts by spraying down three sets of flames that are bursting from the windows on the ground floor.

These window fires must be extinguished before anything else can happen. Thankfully, it only takes one “Extinguish” order, and Samson will run around to all the windows and put them out. Presently, Samson manages to put them out, so he needs to now rescue the three trapped Sims.

He enters the front door, and gets to the second floor. After putting out some more flames that are in his way, he comes to the door, which has a little axe icon on it. A Sim is behind the door, standing on the balcony, and is screaming for help. Samson interacts with the door, choosing the “Break Down” command, and the trapped Sim is free!

Samson interacts with the Sim—it’s Trenton Alto this time around—and uses the “Convince To Run” social interaction, which is helpfully the only one there; you won’t accidentally order your firefighter to start making out with a victim while the house burns down around you. That social interaction always succeeds, so Samson runs back into the building to fight more flames.

Soon, Samson finishes off all the flames, but still has two “trapped Sims” to deal with. Now it becomes a bit of a Where’s Waldo? game where we try to find everyone. Strangely enough, the other two are both in the backyard. I paused the game, queued up both “Convince To Run” commands, and then unpaused to let Samson do what he needed to do.

Clearing the emergency nets Samson another large paycheck, as well as a reward from the city! It’s after Samson’s shift, so he drives over to City Hall for his reward before going home.

Other Emergencies

Samson will encounter other emergencies as he goes along as well. By far the most boring are called “Building Emergencies”: these are random events that you only see via the message center. For example, Samson once had to head to the school to clean out a herd of llamas that had gotten loose and stampeded around. However, there are no animations to this, and fixing the situation just means going into the building and watching a progress bar fill, almost like a conventional job. I guess not every emergency can be overtly interactive, but at least this will be an easy paycheck, especially after dealing with large house fires.

The ultimate emergency around the city is an earthquake, which will set off multiple emergencies around the city. Samson gets through it by extinguishing fires, clearing away rubble to free trapped Sims, and interacting with the kitchen stove to stop a gas leak. Once he clears one house, he is alerted in the message center to go to the next house and repeat the procedure. It takes him three houses (and until 2am!) to clear everything, but he does it, and earns a medal!

Because of that series of successes, as well as his great skills and strong relationships, it’s not long before Samson gets promoted all the way up to chief of the fire department. He gets to install a fire alarm in his home, plus he gets a free fire truck in his personal inventory. He can park the fire truck outside, but he needs to buy a Large Parking Space from Buy Mode; the normal-sized parking spot is too small. Of course, he could just keep it in his ridiculously huge and invisible backpack, but he decides to cram it into an impossibly small space beside the house. (Good thing all the cars teleport, huh?)

Even though Samson can now work from home, he still has a job experience bar and will lose some experience if he blows off work by not being around the alarm (that is, by hanging out at the public pool for example while his work hours are active). Here on out, filling the bar will net him a raise; he’s already at the top of the career track and will not get further promoted, but more money coming into the household is never a bad thing.

Really, the at-home alarm system has three benefits. First, remember that Samson is paid not just per week, but per emergency as well. Also remember that as Samson gets promoted, he works fewer hours at the firehouse. (Because Samson is at the top of the career track, he only works a mere five hours per day.) This means Samson won’t see many emergencies if he’s restricted to the firehouse, because he’s not there very much. By being “on the clock” 24 hours per day, this means that he can quickly run out to deal with an emergency at any time, even if he’s not at the firehouse, allowing him to collect even more money and job experience!

The second benefit to having the at-home alarm system is a new command in the fire truck. If the alarm goes off, Samson can interact with the fire truck and select a command that is essentially an automated emergency command. For example, the command may read “Extinguish Small House Fire” or “Deal With [Building] Disaster.” By selecting that command, the process will be automated; that is, the artificial intelligence will tell Samson what to do. It still won’t be quite as effective as holding his hand, but at least that way you can order him to deal with the emergency while you, the player, stay at home and deal with other priorities. You will probably have to help him out for large fires, but he can handle the rest on his own.

The third and final benefit is the most obvious: he can do anything he wants at home, such as work on job skills or better his relationships, while being ready to respond to an emergency. This is truly total freedom.

All in all, setting up an at-home fire alarm and his personal fire truck is nothing but good for Samson. He may have to run out at all hours of the night, but at least the money will continue to roll in. Just remember that Samson still needs to maintain his truck and alarm at home just like the ones at the firehouse, but at least he’ll have plenty of time to do so.

Firefighter Q&A

I need to stop the window fires before going inside… but I can’t seem to find them! Any tips?

If you arrive on a scene fast enough, the fires may have not expanded to their full power yet, so you may not initially see flames bursting through glass. So, the hint here is to look at the window frame: windows need to be extinguished will be blackened. Of course, if you don’t put them out quickly enough, they might spread to other windows, making your job harder.

Okay, I found them, but I’m having trouble controlling them. Any tips for fighting those window fires?

Window fires are annoying because they spread quickly. The thing is, there are three rules, and you can exploit them to keep things under control. First, any given window can only light up once; second, any given window can only spread its flames to an adjacent window (“adjacent” defined here as “the next window along the external wall,” meaning an adjacent window could be around the corner); third, the fires can only get so powerful and won’t start spreading throughout the house unlike reality.

The strategy therefore is to extinguish the smallest window fires first, which are extinguished more quickly than the larger fires, and to also prevent that window from lighting up again. Once you have the small fires under control, you’ll want to work from the outside of a set of windows toward the middle. So, say three adjacent windows are on fire. You want to extinguish the two outside ones first, then ignore> the middle fire until last; it can’t spread again because you’ve already finished off the windows around it, and the flames won’t grow so powerfully that they start lighting up other windows farther away.

While clicking around during an emergency, a “Take” command came up. What’s that do?

By clicking on the floor of a room during a fire, the “Take” command will occasionally come up. What that does is it orders your Sim to swipe something from the home he’s in, exactly like the “Steal Something” command of Sims with the Kleptomaniac trait. Any firefighter can steal from any home regardless of his traits to get yourself a little ill-gotten bonus, but it’s a pretty jerkface thing to do, isn’t it? Note that the command will be grayed out if any Sim is in the same room: you can’t steal when someone is watching you!

I want a fireman’s pole for my house, but I can’t find it. Is it supposed to be in the stairs tool of Build Mode?

Nope, it’s in the entertainment sort (and sporting goods subsort) of Buy Mode. When you place it, place it on the lower floor, and the pole will automatically go up to the floor above. The pole can only extend up one floor, so if you want to make poles for your whole house, you may need multiple poles. Note that you will not be allowed to place the pole if there are objects on either the bottom floor or the floor above it, so make sure there is plenty of room clear. Also know that the Sims have smart pathfinding, and will typically slide down the pole to go down on their own, but will probably use the stairs (because it’s usually quicker) to go up, unless there are no stairs.